Thursday, April 26, 2012

The only change in schedule for the Masters Women and Masters Men SBX Race days compared to Open Class was no lunch break.There were a few other age groups competing so there was plenty of time to get nutrition when you needed it though (food is very important!).

Practice Time

Ale (see Athlete Bio Page:here) raced on the only ‘snow’ day we had during the whole trip (it was 60’s and sunny every day). The forecast was for rain and we thought “how appropriate”. Considering that about a 1/3 of our training days were in the rain this year, we thought that no one’s going to be better prepared for these conditions – lol. Thankfully no rain fell. It was around 40 degrees and actually spitting snow and flurries with a few breaks of sunshine.

We spent one of our ‘off’ days in between practice and racing up on the hill watching the Open Class SBX competition.It’s always helpful to see how the best riders are handling the course, the line they choose, what gate is fastest, etc. especially when finalizing/confirming your race strategy. And these guys/gals are pretty good. On a relatively tight course the top men were hitting over 40 mph and the best time trial run was :56 for the Men and 1:02 for the Women. Hopefully you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about when you watch the video, though most of the footage is from the start and top sections.

All race days start the same way; course inspection, practice time, and then time trials to set seeding. After a lunch break, they began the heats. I filmed some of the Men and Women’s time trials, their consolation round and final (commonly known as the Small Final and Big Final - Small runs first, then the Big Final).

The good news is that the races that day confirmed that we were spot on with our course strategy and plan and boosted our confidence for the upcoming races.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

This post chronicles our practice day experience from Nationals earlier this month.There has been a ton of video to edit so it’s taken me a while to get things prepared for web publishing, but now that all the prep work is done, I’ll have a few new posts up in quick succession.